Not only do I have a cold, and that invincible drowsiness which comes with it, but being self fucking employed I can’t even have a bloody skive!  God dammit! I feel like Kevin the Teenager from the Fast Show, it’s just so unfaaaaair!

Anyhow, to explain myself, yes that really is an armoured dinosaur up there at the top of the page.  I did a Google image search for ‘heavy cold’ and apart from a bewildering array of machetes, that image featured quite prominently.  And it’s an armoured fucking dinosaur for goodness’ sake!  More such mental (and rather cool) illustrations can be found on the site whence I pinched it.

I remember a lot of friends of mine at school were very keen on their fantasy RPGs, but I never really got into it myself.  And, a little like being a music obsessive, I suppose it can come across as a bit sad and nerdy from the outside.  But whenever I walk past Forbidden Planet on the Royal Mile, particularly on a Winter evening when it’s cold and rainy outside and warm and light inside, and all the fantasy fans are in there with their figurines and dice and cards and whatever other accoutrements they have, then it really does look like a very sociable and very enjoyable thing to be doing.  I guess I just got nabbed by records instead.

So, as Winter slowly approaches, coughs and sneezes abound and the Scottish night becomes dramatically longer, why not pretend it’s not cold and shitey outside, delurk for a change and chip in five silly answer to five silly questions on here, and then blether away talking shite with other skivers and slackers for the rest of the afternoon.

1. Name your armoured dinosaur.
2. Pick one crucial feature an armoured dinosaur must have in order to be truly fearsome.
3. What is its secret Achilles Heel?
4. You know those really cool half and half animals in fantasy stories?  Which two would you mix?
5. Do you actually like fantasy stories or films or whatever, or do you just find it childish nonsense?

Navigator – Danger Dragon

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Dragons – Here are the Roses

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E.S.L. – Princess vs Dragon

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Sunset Rubdown – Dragon’s Lair

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Hot Lava – Blue Dragon

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My brother heads off today, so I figured we’d take one last chance to do a podcast while we can.  This is mostly new stuff and inbox though, so I am not sure how he’ll react.

Actually, he was in the room last week while I went through my inbox, played stuff, replied to emails, deleted things, and so on and so forth.  I think his response was that he simply wouldn’t be able to handle the avalanche of shit I have to get through, and that it would simply turn him off music completely.

I don’t mind that, I have to confess, because although some people do send me wildly inappropriate things, after two hours of listening to one ‘psychedelic rock band who are blazing a trail across the LA scene right now’ after another I then open an email from Allister Izenberg, which was possibly the most terse, abrupt and non-sugar-coated promo email I have ever read, even including Trips and Falls.  It was such a bad email actually that even before listening I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to really like the music, and boy oh boy was I right.  It makes all the ‘rock, hip-hop, funk fusion’s next big thing’ emails easily worthwhile.

Toadcast #131 – The Brocast

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01. Hot Lava – Pink Lemonade (02.52)
02. Burnt Island – Hiding Out (07.42)
03. King Post Kitsch – Monomaniac (11.26)
04. Glass Animals – Leaflings (19.17)
05. Allister Izenberg – Little Swan (24.24)
06. Television Keeps us Apart – Voices (33.22)
07. Ola Belle Reed – High on a Mountain (41.01)
08. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird (51.54)
09. Willard Grant Conspiracy & Telefunk – The Cuckoo (54.23)
10. Soft Cat – Blackbird (62.41)

Once more we get to Fresh Air time, and this week I have a splendidly hot off the press mp3 from the new New Pornogrgaphers album.  It arrived in my inbox just as I was getting ready to leave work, so you can’t get much more news-whorish than that!

For the rest of the show, however, I am going to take a slightly different tack to the usual indie-folk, or whatever you want to call it.  I have some Dusty Springfield, some Nicole Atkins, some Bettye Swan and even some Dionne Warwick just because erm… well no reason really, it just struck my fancy when I was picking songs for the playlist in all honesty.

Live on Air 8pm-9.30pm – Listen live here.

I’ll fill in the playlist live below from 8pm onwards, so feel free to leave feedback, constructive criticism, mindless abuse, etc in the comments during the show.

01. Dionne Warwick- I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself
02. Joanna Newsom- On a Good Day
03. Grand National- Boner
04. Hot Lava- The Auctioneer
05. Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose- 3 Knife
06. Dusty Springfield- Don’t Forget About Me
07. The Come Ons- Strangelove
08. The Morning Benders- Excuses
09. Mountain Man- Honeybee
10. Nicole Atkins- Brooklyn’s On Fire
11. Scott Walker- The Girls And The Dogs
12. Kate & Anna McGarrigle- Love Over and Over
13. New Pornographers- Your Hands Together
14. Lissie- Everywhere I Go
15. Morrissey- You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side
16. The Tallest Man On Earth- King of Spain
17. Vampire Weekend- White Sky

It’s not many 7″ records which give you six songs of listening enjoyment, but this is what Hot Lava and the Sad Cobras have achieved on this split EP.  Both have one epic song which just exceeds a Tolstoyian two-and-a-half minutes, but everything else is well under the two minute barrier – not a second wasted.

In all honesty, I am not that taken with the Sad Cobras songs, so I will instead focus on Hot Lava, whose debut album Lavaology I really enjoyed.

Basically, this has the same, slightly frantic charm as the album.  Taskmaster is a lot slower-paced – almost a song you could imagine Camera Obscura aiming for – but it’s the sheer pop joy of this lot which makes these songs so satisfying for me. There’s no need to be deep about this, it’s just bouncy indie pop with plenty of electronic decoration, and really nicely executed melodic twists and turns.  What more need be said?

Hot Lava – The Auctioneer

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Hot Lava MySpace | The Sad Cobras MySpace | Buy the 7″

This week’s Toadcast has no theme at all because, erm… well, frankly they’re difficult to come up with and therefore seem just a tiny little bit like hard work.  So given I’m podcasting once a week now, I am not going to be arsed coming up with some immaculately scripted (ah ha haaa!) arrangement once every seven days, so this week it’s really just a brief tour of inbox fodder.

This weekend there are loads of good things happening, not least a performance by Mumford & Sons at the Voodoo Rooms, and a first look for me at what could potentially become an excellent new venue in Edinburgh.  That’s a secret though, so no more details than that.

So, for now enjoy the Soulcast, so named for no better reason than that the first couple of songs have the word soul in the title.  Piss-poor excuse really, isn’t it.

Toadcast #41 – The Soulcast

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01. Nat Johnson – Dirty Rotten Soul (02.39)
02. Maxwell Panther – Lost Soul on a Roll (06.21)
03. Deerhoof – Chandelier Searchlight (11.40)
04. Aberfeldy – Claire (15.01)
05. Hot Lava – Blue Dragon (21.11)
06. Deathbot – The Cold Wind Revival (23.20)
07. Lambchop – Sharing a Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr. (28.41)
08. Wilco – Company in My Back (35.45)
09. Woodenbox – Twisted Mile (39.17)
10. Pale Young Gentlemen – There is a Place (46.33)
11. Japanese Motors – Spendin’ Days (54.52)

Erm, indie-surf-synth-gameboy-pop perhaps? I guess. I’m not really sure. It has all those elements in it, but I’d hesitate to pin any of them to this record too definitively.

You know, I really took some time to come round to this. I heard a promo mp3, asked for a review copy, and promptly ceased to like the music. It was really awkward, and not a little bit weird. I genuinely sat there thinking ‘gosh, this is shit, what was I thinking?’ But then things started to swing. The album I didn’t like began to slowly, over quite a few listens, seep into my brain.

Now? Well a pretty near 180° turn, actually. I’ll admit that the last couple of songs don’t do much for me at all, but for the most part this is bloody marvellous. The gameboy side is sprightly and surprising, the surfy bit gets you bopping along, and the little bit of scratch and crackle added to the guitar and vocals pulls it way back from ever threatening to be saccharine – it’s great.

So now that I’ve finally come around, I have to confess I heartily recommend this as one of the best examples of a kind of fuzzy electro-based and very dancefloor-friendly indie music which I have for some time been half on the verge of getting into, without ever quite clicking with the stuff. The drive, at its best, seems to come from some pretty relentless drumming and the wailing, distracted synth. This produces both a focussed rhythm and slightly unhinged melody that oddly remind me just a little of early Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

If this music fails to ignite it seems often to lie in the tension between the synth and the vocals. These two are usually duelling fantastically, rolling along together, intertwining and breaking apart to define the urgency of the song in their own relationship. Just occasionally, they don’t quite spark one another’s tinder, and ignition is just not quite achieved. It’s rare though. For the most part this is a really good, slightly edgy, energetic album, full of tension and eccentricity. I like.

Hot Lava – Apple+Option+Fire
Hot Lava – Mummy Beach

Website | More mp3s | Buy the album from Bar-None Records